Covering a randomly selected song every day for a year, between my 39th and 40th birthdays.
FOR GREAT JUSTICE!

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Friday, June 4, 2010

78. "Not a Pretty Girl" by Ani DiFranco

Ani's not an easy prospect to reinterpret. I could care less about gender-shifting the protagonist... a lot of my favorite songs to cover (when I call the shots instead of The Machine) are by women. The trick is that Ani's delivery makes it hard to sing her material without sounding like you're trying to sound like her. Which is kind of interesting, because in the context of her records the songs all sound like they're being sung by other people.

Anyway, I tried to make this sound like it might be being sung by someone with good intentions but a certain lack of self-knowledge and maybe even a touch of subliminated lechery, if that makes sense. The person on the internet discussion board that's very gushy and positive about where they are, but periodically, spectacularly loses his or her shit. I don't know how well that worked.

The music is patched together from the original tracks on a cassette of a 4-track demo I made maybe 15 years ago, coincidentally around the time the album featuring this song came out. What you hear in the background, relatively untouched, is my first ever attempt to record myself playing keyboards. I haven't really advanced much!